Monday, May 16, 2016

Writing for the Boston Globe, Michael Cohen argues
that Donald Trump has, in various remarks about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,
given us a preview of an authoritarian regime. Trump notes that Bezos
owns a newspaper that has run negative stories about him, and assumes
that Bezos has ordered it to do so. His response as Chief Executive
won't be to prove them wrong, but to both abuse libel law and invent
new anti-trust
abuses to go after Bezos:

Back in February, Trump said
about Amazon "if I become president, oh do they have problems. They're
going to have such problems." It was a charge he repeated this
week. "He [Bezos] bought this paper for practically nothing," said
Trump, "and he's using that as a tool for political power against me
and against other people ... and we can't let him get away with
it."

He also talked about changing libel laws to make it
easier to sue newspapers. But his talk about Bezos is something else
altogether. What he's hinting at is that he would use the anti-trust
division of the Justice Department to go after a newspaper publisher
who writes stories that he doesn't like.

This is a
direct threat. And even if Trump has no intention of following
through, he is clearly trying to intimidate Bezos and in turn The
Washington Post from running negative stories about
him. Indeed, Trump is trying to get Bezos to use his position as
owner of the paper to influence the Post's coverage. [my emphasis,
and other format edits]

I agree with Cohen that such
threats disqualify Trump for the presidency, and will not vote for
this man. Whatever arguments there might be that he might be less
likely to further tax or regulate the economy than Clinton would be
are rendered moot by his threat to freedom of speech, which we
absolutely need in order to see our way out of and leave the current
cultural and political mess. I am not calling Clinton a champion of
freedom of speech by a long shot, but at least nobody will be calling
her a champion of free enterprise, either.